Nora Alter sees the 1990s as the period in which essay films really proliferated. She writes that whilst the ‘essay film’ has been produced ‘sporadically’ for the last seventy years or so, ‘today, it seems that essay films are everywhere’.460 By and large, there has been a tendency to equate the essay with personal reflection, and in turn, a leaning towards the notion of the ‘subjective’. My thesis has aimed to unpick this tendency and demonstrate that at particular historical moments, and within specific public spheres, a consideration of the dialectic between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, between ‘self’ and ‘other’ and between ‘fragment’ and ‘whole’ has been lacking. I have tried to explore lineages that recognise these dialectics. Whilst the genre of the essay, in its initial literary incarnation, may have appeared to be preoccupied with unmediated personal reflection on a subject, explorations by Montaigne, Lukács and Adorno (detailed in Chapter Four) indicate a careful consideration of the continual shift and movement between how one’s thoughts and perceptions connect to a wider system of social, economic, cultural and historical processes. I have aimed to show how, and indeed why, the supposed universalist and immutable categories of ‘The Subject’ or ‘The Object’, for example, are mobilised by practices such as Biemann’s and Ruido’s. Works such as these are crucial for understanding the political role of the aesthetic at the turn of the twenty-first century. They enable discussion of the debates that are at stake, their tensions and the outer limits of such terms: in short, they allow for a reading of the dynamism of subject-object relations.
If one unpicks this notion of a ‘documentary turn’, works such as Biemann’s and Ruido’s sit at a slight remove from the ‘personal’ conception of the essayistic; or, they at least attempt unapologetically to use some of the more problematic and most
criticised aspects of the documentary medium. For example, Laura Rascaroli, following Paul Arthur, asserts that an essay is a personal reflection ‘that does not propose itself anonymous or collective, but as originating from a single authorial voice’.461 This statement highlights the important difference, however slight, between the general perception of the essay film and the video essays of artists such as Biemann and Ruido. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
460 Alter (2003), p. 21.
461 Laura Rascaroli’s précis of Paul Arthur’s argument. See her text ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework 49, no. 2, Fall 2008, pp. 24-47, (p. 35). !
! "*+! Biemann, for example, appears to acknowledge her inquisitive role in Performing the Border, but it is clear that she is but one voice among many in determining the vicissitudes of such a space. Her voice is directive, disembodied, pedagogic and questioning. It is not often that she contemplates her role as image-maker through the voice over or that she fixates on what it means for her to travel and experience a place ‘first hand’ bringing her own ‘ways of seeing’ with her.462 There is an obvious
dissatisfaction with what the ‘documentary’ and its ‘real’ can do; as Biemann herself states, ‘the idea was not so much to document the reality of a border town’. She continues, ‘performing the border is put together in a way that slowly but steadily unravels the many layers of global processes that are inscribed in this place [Ciudad Juarez]’.463 However, it is, I would argue, precisely the form of the document that is capable of producing such a ‘report’ — report of a space that is made real not only through on-site filming which transcribes the space for those that have not travelled there, but just as importantly, through the array of visuals in which it is translated and constituted for a variety of people and institutions.
My thesis has privileged a deployment of the theoretical advancements gained through scholars of the photographic image. Chapter Three charts the debates which argued for and against an altered perception of the index and of the photograph’s commitment to the real from 1989 through into the 1990s. I ultimately conclude that whilst new technologies open up new possibilities, the material use and value of the photographic machine is not altered beyond recognition because of the shift from analogue to digital. My analysis demonstrates how, since the early 1990s, the
documentary has steadily moved back to the centre of socially and politically engaged art production both in the guise and through the specificity of the film and video-essay. Whilst photography may have become part and parcel of the accepted mediums of the artist, shedding a need to continually be presented with the prefix ‘art’, or indeed separated from art, I hope this study has shown how documentary (in its expanded and historicised sense) must now be read in a similar fashion.
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462 In 2008 Biemann made X-Mission. There is a short segment in this video-essay that, through her voice-over, explicitly reveals her role as director of the images she deploys. This also occurs visually when a camera records Biemann at work in her post-production editing suite in Black Sea Files (2005).
463 Ursula Biemann, ‘Remote Sensing: An Interview with Ursula Biemann’, Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, vol. 24, issue 1-2, 2002, pp. 91-109, (p. 92).
! "*"! This final chapter shall identify the limitations of my research, and finally
argues for the importance of closer excavations in the history of the documentary. Rather than posit a ‘coming of age’ within contemporary art production, I hope to have shown how the documentary’s interpellation, and constant role, in the formation of the moving image, has taken place and continues to do so. No less importantly, I hope to have provided an account of precisely why this contested and fractured form has gained particular prominence under neoliberal capitalism. I shall now identify three areas that I consider important when examining the ‘documentary turn’ in contemporary art
discourse.
Definition through Negation
In my introductory chapter, I observe a variety of terms used to describe the genre of the ‘essay film’ or ‘film essay’: they range from ‘experimental documentary’ to ‘art
documentary’, ‘theory films’ to ‘docu-essay to ‘documentary fiction’ and the ‘personal documentary’. My aim was not to secure a proper definition. I do not wish to deny, however, the importance of the ‘classification’ process in producing a detailed analytical account. The majority of artists who adopt the term ‘video-essay’, ‘film essay’ or ‘visual essay’, and the scholars across art and film history, stress the problems of the descriptor. Mostly, there is, I would argue, an overt resignation to the medium’s ‘hybrid’ nature. For some, it is enough to focus on the medium’s propensity for
straddling different genres and for muddying the waters between fiction and non-fiction. Moreover, herein lies the strength of this ‘neither/nor’ product: its inclusivity and
penchant for incompleteness have, I would argue, become one of its central
characteristics, but certainly not the main identifier. For Nora Alter, the essay film is ‘not a genre’ precisely because its very purpose is to move beyond ‘formal, conceptual, and social constraint’.464 Similarly, Rascaroli observes that ‘heresy’, in the Adornian literary essay sense, is a particularly important term when examining the thinking around the ‘essay film’.465 ‘Heresy’ is here used in Adorno’s sense: that is, as with the
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464 Nora Alter, ‘The Political Im/perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki's “Images of the World and the Inscription of War”’, New German Critique, no. 68 (Spring/Summer 1996), p. 171. 465 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Colombia University Press, 1991), p. 23. Quoted in Laura Rascaroli, (2008), pp. 24-47.
! "*#! written essay, the ‘essay film’ is praised and enjoyed for its ‘protean’ form, for its ability to digress, fragment and repeat.
There is, however, quite a paradox present when looking through the lens of either the film or the art historian and theoretician. With the film scholars, a closer attention is paid to the theorisation of the essay film and its relation, and explicit connection to, the documentary. However, the characteristics of the film essay, its hybridity and inconclusiveness, are often those favoured by the artist and thus aspects which the art historian and/or theoretician must attend to when analysing such work. These characteristics make it easier, perhaps, to be inventive, to examine the
construction of knowledge and the varied manner in which power is orchestrated on and through the body, both individual and collective.
There is, however, a problem with uncritically adopting a supposed ‘open’ form if this ‘open’ form is not historicised, and it is here that works such as Biemann’s and Ruido’s make their intervention. For example, the art historian and critic, T.J. Demos argues that video essays such as Nervus Rerum by the London-based Otolith Group ‘re- invent’ the documentary mode.466 This observation elides a thorough analysis of the history of the documentary and a prioritising of fiction, fragmentation and fabrication, without giving enough importance to what are frequently considered the negative aspects of the documentary lens: its fidelity to truth (single, multiple and varied); its aspirations towards a drive for totality (mindful to not obscure and collapse what appear as contradictions); and its considered understanding of the role of the viewer. These key aspects are haunted by a deeply troublesome past. They can work to homogenise; they can work to ‘own’ those filmed (as discussed at length in the previous chapter); and they can work to shut down the processes of subjectivation and provide simple cause- effect narratives which consign the lens-based image to simple reflection theory. One can only begin to readdress these problematised traits once more in the knowledge (and celebration) that loosening such apparently harmonious aesthetic forms made a space !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
466 I am referring to Demos’ article ‘The Right to Opacity: On the Otolith Group’s Nervus Rerum, October 129, Summer 2009, pp. 113-128. In this article, Demos’ quotes Anjalika Sagar (one half of the Otolith Group) in her call to ‘place documentary images on trial’ (p. 122). This appears reminiscent of Hito Steyerl’s contention that the documentary image is a partial fragment of the truth. However, the Otolith Group’s Nervus Rerum is at risk of privileging fiction and the politics of representation above all else. It actively avoids any capacity it might have as a document for instrumentalisation. Whilst this is not surprising, I would argue that an engagement with other fields of inquiry, such as journalism, that use the medium of the
documentary, is best acknowledged and carefully considered, rather than ignored and dismissed. !
! "*$! for an emphasis on the first person. Without doubt, that this focus on the first person was driven by women directors and artists of colour as early adopters and shapers of the formation of the essay film after 1970. It is crucial to never overlook the reason why oral storytelling and narrative is so important politically. These very narratives are the counter-narratives that add, subtract, unpick and rewrite history’s hegemonic tale. They are, more often than not, the stories of the oppressed, the subordinated, hidden and silenced. Oral traditions have been, more often than not, the only way in which one could historicise oneself.
To return to the question of ‘naming’: alongside the underdeveloped
appropriation of the term ‘documentary’ runs the appropriation of another genre, that of the literary essay. I am mindful that in borrowing its terms we continually show our inability to provide the video-essay with new terms and definitions for analysis. Whilst it is clear that there are many benefits to avoiding classification (and the ossification that can bring), we must also be vigilant in respect of the problems presented by under- theorising because of a fear of doing so. Resorting to the terms of another genre — for example, seeing the literary ‘essay’ as the antecedent to works such as Ruido’s and Biemann’s —can cause many problems when one crosses to the visual text without accounting for the specificity of the video medium.467
We have identified figures (Alexander Astruc, for example) who called for the acceptance of the camera as a tool that could be just as flexible, subtle and nuanced an apparatus as the writer’s pen. Astruc could not have imagined how the technological advancements in film would produce ever smaller and more portable machines through which to record and reconstruct the world around us. The adeptness and flexibility of the pen has become ever more closely matched by the video camera. Whilst these claims are important, they orient analysis too firmly in one direction, making meaning and analysis flow from one source. The images produced by lens-based technologies must be read alongside, and with attention to, the other spheres in which the medium is received. Because lens-based images are at once both artistic and commercial, any !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
467 This movement is eloquently considered in Lazzarato and Melitopoulos’ understanding of the capacity of the digital video medium. They discuss how experimentation with the formal qualities of the video medium and its ability to mimic, produce, expand and contract temporal experiences — processes that form our understanding of history; ours and its connections to that of others. Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos, ‘Digital Montage and Weaving: An Ecology of the Brian for Machine Subjectivities, Stuff it! The video essay in the digital age, (ed.) Ursula Biemann, (Zurich: Voldemeer AG Zurich, 2003), pp. 116-126.
! "*%! attempts to theorise their role should not ignore such interrelated material conditions and systems of production, dissemination and reception. In the same fashion that careful readings of the still photographic image avoid rendering a false split between art
photography and social documentary, or the photojournalist documenter and the
‘investigative’ artist, we too must avoid such readings when historicising, analysing and conceptualising how the video or film essay is understood alongside the documentary.
What then do we gain from compiling the varied terms to describe such a genre? Attempts to define are productive in the sense that they allow us to gather some key identifiers in order to begin serious analytical work. Alongside an engagement with the subjective and the reflexive are other areas for concern. The compulsion to produce an account, the experimentation with the author’s voice, the use of archival images and images from other related, but independent sources, all contribute to the modern video- essay.
What follows will work through these aspects. In holding on to these
intermeshed elements, we must not neglect the mutable nature of such classifications. To simply say that any explicitly non-fiction artist film or video ‘reconfigures’ or ‘reinvents’ the documentary, is, in my view, both inattentive and insufficient. More important here is the need to read these varied terms as both symptoms of their specific historic moment, and as generating specific moments themselves. Indeed, not only are these terms merely formal indicators of a set of particular historical, economic, political and social determinants, rather, they are agents for contributing to change.
Authorship, the voice, and the boundaries of self and other
In the penultimate chapter of this thesis, I drew out in what ways I considered the use of the voice, and the manner in which narrative was deployed, in Performing the Border and Ruido’s two works. Akerman’s From the Other Side aided the discussion and acted as a point of comparison. Akerman’s work, I argued, interacts with ‘traditional’ and uncritical perceptions of the documentary in a fashion different from that of Biemann’s Performing the Border. As the analysis showed, however, there can be no straight and finalised readings of these two works. The readings operate here to demarcate the lines of the debates and are used to ask productive questions of one another. In the
scholarship on ‘non-fiction’ cinema much has been written about the use of the voice. The voice has had — and continues to have — a powerful role in the history of the
! "*&! documentary. It can work as the caption does, in an explanatory fashion, and serve to make the meaning of the image clear, through either a ‘voice off’, ‘voice-over’ or through intertitles. Or, it can translate an overt and specific ideological message: the voice here can incite through propagandist intentions. It can also be a tool through which to teach and enlighten.
The voice, as noted in my analysis of Biemann’s and Rudio’s videos, can be split: tending towards either the author ‘teaching’ or the author ‘learning’. It is honed through the manner in which the rhetoric is delivered: through a delivery characterised by either questions or statements. The statements (a preference shown by Biemann in Performing the Border) can be seen as being closer to the much-criticised ‘voice of God’, a disembodied, overarching narrative that appears to ‘tell the truth’. This type of command and structured ownership of the filmed material has typically afforded no space for alternative approaches, purporting to transcribe history with a capital ‘H’. It stands accused of defining, limiting, and obliterating complexities. How to handle the tool of the voice, it would seem, is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of expanded documentary. On the other hand, the questioning voice is perhaps closer to the
essayistic mode. It begins, it could be said, from the interior, from the individual subjective position. It opens outwards, rather than sits atop. It is does not tend to make grand claims. It aims — and in some examples in quite a humble fashion — to speak from a singular perspective, from the modesty of the singular ‘I’ rather than the grandiose ‘I’.
However, works that have an unashamedly political intent — either through form, subject matter, or, in the most careful accounts, through both — have a desire to connect together disparate voices. Recent attempts to reclaim authorship, to examine the particular whilst understanding its inescapable links to the global, must, rather than just circumnavigate, actually traverse the colonial past of the camera. Closer, detailed and nuanced accounts of the act of taking the photographic image can help us to alter and create new ways to read the documentary image, which avoid having to siphon off the genre of the video-essay as something entirely separate or, indeed, as some maturation of the form. Alongside such accounts are the possibilities that are opened up through post-production devices, and the expediency presented by continually developing distribution systems.
The ‘video-essays’ of Biemann and Ruido are of particular relevance because they demonstrate a commitment to the text, to the word, to the narrative, in a way that
! "*'! more uncritical treatments of the documentary may not necessarily do. The text in these works — the use of the intertitles to segment, to organise and present — works in a similar way to Montaigne’s sentiment regarding the ability of the essay to open up a problem, rather than discover an answer. The texts do however, aim for an account, a knowing of some sorts, just as an essay aims to ‘assay’ or weigh up. In using ‘accounts’ generated from other fields of knowledge — journalism, military, personal stories, industry produced and owned images, for example — they stitch together a horizontal picture that they are unafraid to commit their voice to. Quite pertinently, the deployment